Kurapaty

Kurapaty (Курапаты, kuraˈpatɨ) is a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, Belarus, in which a vast number of people were executed between 1937 and 1941 during the Great Purge by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The exact count of victims is uncertain, as NKVD archives are classified in Belarus. According to various sources the number of people who perished in Kurapaty is estimated to be at least 30,000 (according to the Attorney General of BSSR Tarnaŭski), up to 100,000 people (according to "Belarus" reference book), from 102,000 to 250,000 people (according to the article by Zianon Pazniak in the "Litaratura i Mastactva" newspaper), 250,000 people (according to Polish historian and professor of University of Wrocław Zdzisław Julian Winnicki), and more (according to the British historian Norman Davies). Most of the victims were the Belarusian intelligentsia. In 2004, Kurapaty mass graves were included in the register of the Cultural Properties of Belarus as a first-category cultural heritage. The discovery by historian Zianon Paźniak and exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave an added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of the Soviet Union before it dissolved. There have been investigations by both the Soviet, and Belarusian governments, which have been conclusive as to the perpetrators were Soviet NKVD. This is based on former NKVD members' confessions and the eyewitness testimonies of 55 villagers, from villages such as Cna, Cna-Yodkava, Drazdova, Padbaloccie and others, who gave evidence that NKVD brought people in trucks and executed them during 1937–1941. President of the United States Bill Clinton visited Kurapaty forest in 1994, when he came to Belarus with a "thank you" visit after Belarus agreed to transfer their post-Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia. Clinton gifted a small granite monument "To Belarusians from the American people", perhaps the first post-Soviet cultural artifact from the U.S. on the Belarusian soil.